Rant Rant Rant...
Be constructive people... Stuff like "it rocks!/it sucks!" will not be posted. General ranting is accepted at the
Where the heck is the AX2001 coverage??
Okay, I'm gonna beat you guys to the punch and rant on myself ^^; Gomen again for the extremely delayed roll-out of this silly webpage. Apparently I had burned out the video-in circuit of my old video capture card and being the anime addict that I am, always found myself short of funds on replacing the card cuz of um.. "other" expenses :P But I finally got it and here the page! So I'll just say one final "GOMEN NASAI MINNA-SAN!"
-- Duo
What's up with the no-shows?!Anyone want to "re-tackle" this one? I'm quite fed up with it...
Ah, I've got a taker. This is Nanakaoru-san's response to this comment I made on the ezboard:
"There were fewer entries last year because there were MORE no-shows. Don't get me started on this rant... *grumbles*"
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Yah, Duo, I know... but that's me point exactly... :P I think more people were intimidated by the competition and decided to drop out of sight. I remember on the first ever karaoke contest at AX (98) a friend and I were gonna enter as a duet but she freaked out when she saw how many people seemed way more prepared than we were, so she DUMPED me!! Luckily I'm pretty fearless, so I decided to compete by myself and did pretty bad, but at least it gave me the courage and the desire to try harder for the next one and harder for the next one ever since ^^.
But I agree it's pretty disrespectful to the competition when contestants fail to show up... the best solution I could think of would be to have a standby group of entries to fill in the voids left by the no-shows. The bad thing about that would be that mebbe the people on the standby list would also freak and not want to sing... so it all goes back to my initial, now apparently fool-proof theory... people are still a bit afraid of the level of competitiveness of the contest. I guess it's a lot different than masquerade, where less than 2% of the entries drop out, because although the competition in itself is way fiercer, you're only out there for 2 minutes, you just have to go out ONCE, and you know that if your costume is finished to a point where you are proud of it, you will definately want to show it off.
Or I dunno... seems to me the amount of pressure put on karaoke and masquerade contestants should be about the same... or mebbe some people are still unaware of how well organized the karaoke contest is, and don't take it nearly as seriously as masquerade, where no one has any doubt how good the participants are...
Good God... I have created the Godzilla of rambles...
Duo, could this rant make it in your page? :P (Done :P -Duo)
NK
*There was a point here somewhere...*
Comment from the Head Guy...
It is one of my top priorities to make sure that all-night karaoke is back for AX2002. Judging by the great turnout for karaoke and the greater amount of exposure we got this year (I believe this was the first year that we were actually covered in the at-con newsletter!) I think things look good for all night karaoke.
About being moved around in the queue -- it can be a little annoying, but our staffers' primary goal is to make sure that as many different people get to sing as possible. There may be people who only want to sing 1 song but have to wait 2 hours in order to do so. We do our best to limit that kind of waiting by moving people who do sign up a lot. It's a limitation of our situation -- we aren't a karaoke box where it's just you and your friends and the machine. It's more akin to a karaoke bar where only maybe 15-20 people can sing an hour. So apologies for being moved around -- but we have to do it to be fair to the most people.
For the same reason (being moved around in the queue) it's never really definite when you will be called... we'll try to give you our best estimate of course. We're sorry that you might not have been called. There are two possibilities that could have happened. First, with the short amount of time that we had for open-mic, we couldn't get to everybody who signed up. Second, we are still trying to work out the bugs in our computerized karaoke request system. This was actually the first appearance of the computer system at AX -- expect it to be more stable and possibly even have unattended signup terminals for browsing the collection and printing out lyrics next year! (big kudos to Mitch Im, our tireless IT engineer).
Preliminary round format - we will probably move away from the timeslot model and just have everyone show up at a given time on Thursday evening for the preliminary round. Since songs are less than 2 minutes in length we should be able to get through 40-50 contestants in less than 3 hours. That's far preferable to all the waiting and filler time that we have gone through previously.
Welp, keep the posts coming, folks. :D
H
Possible New Preliminary Round Format...
Just to follow up on what Hong mentioned above. I think it's a great idea because this year, prelims started pretty rowdy but the final few contestants got very little audience. If you make everyone show up, then you'll get at least other contestants as part of the audience and I think it's just respectful to other contestants if you don't just show up... sing... and leave.
Suggestion: Just two things I think you should add to the proposed prelims format.
ONE: Plan a BREAK. I wouldn't want to miss out on the traditional judges/impromptu stuff. This will also give judges a chance to relax, stretch, go to the restroom :b
TWO: The other thing is that if you move away from the time slot format, you'll need to deal with time conflicted contestants differently. The order of contestants should be more flexible and dynamic. Let's say the contest starts at 6:00, contestant 1 can't make it to the contest until 7:00, contestant 2 is running a panel at 8:00, and contestant 3 can't make it til 7:00 AND is running a panel at 8:00. Make the list by putting contestant 1 last, contestant 2 first and leave contestant 3 off the list and insert him/her as the first contestant whenever he/she makes it to the contest.
- Duo
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If you have any comments, please mail me at: duo_kun_2000@yahoo.com |